Saving Doctor Who: Behind the Scenes

Since 2005, Doctor Who has had a showrunner. This is soembody who has overall creative control of the show. He acts as a combination of executive producer, chief writer, and script editor. He casts the Doctor and companions, plans story arcs, writes the majority of the scripts and edits everybody elses, caand basically has a finger in every pie.

This model comes from the American TV industy, and is popular there, since it's thought that there should be somebody who owns the artisitic vision of a show. However, apart from Doctor Who and its various spinoffs, the showrunner system hasn't really caught on in the UK, and I think there's a good reason for this.

It gives one person too much power.

To see why, let's look at one of the most notorious stories of the 21st Cenury, Love & Monsters. There are many problems with this story, but the biggest one is that it ever got made at all. Why didn't somebody read the script and say, "This is terrible! We're not making it"?

Because Russel T Davis wrote it.

This is a frequent pattern. Clunkers usually have the showrunner's name on them. Writing most of the episodes makes it more likely that they'll write a bad one - not just statistically, but because they're likely to be spreading themselves to thin. Added to this, their episodes aren't subject to independent quality control.

The showrunner's power can also go to their heads. We see this as early as the first season, with the conflict between RTD and Chris Eccleston that lead to Chris leaving after only one season. Russel had refused to Chhis's ideas about how he wanted to play the Doctor. When Chris Chibnall became showrunner, he dispensed with the entire established writing team, reconned the show's entire history, and pursued what seemed to be a petty grudge against Steven Moffat, undoing the 50th Anniversary Special apparently out of spite.

Because the role is so high-profile, showrunners will be tempted to do what they think will please the crowd. However, they'll generally be listening to most vocal elements of the online fan community. Many of their ideas come from the world of fanfic, where there's no quality control and anything goes. The idea of genderflipping the Doctor, or giving him a hithertoo unknown mysterious past as the source of the Time Lord's powers, come from the same type of forum where you'll find Captain Kirk in bed with Mr Spock. In fact, the same type of fanfic-inspired nonsense has afflicted recent series of Star Trek, one of which has as it's protagonist Spock's fully-human adoptive sister, who led the only mutiny on a Starfleet vessel, which was later hushed up. Another element of this was a desire to generate publicity by courting controversy.

When RTD returned for the 60th anniversary, it quickly turned out that he had used up all his good ideas the first time round. Many of his stories drew heavily on his previous work, Lux took its solution from Tooth and Claw, while The Well was a sequel to Midnight. Neither were as good. His main idea seemed to have been "Let's get lots of money by making a deal with Disney!" But all we got for that money was two series of expensive-looking nonsense.

The final problem with the showrunner system is that one man is doing too much. This is why the number of episodes has declined from 13 in 2005 to 8 in 2025. The showrunner is overworked, the audiene are short-changed.

In the 20th Century, the roles of producer and script editor were seperate. The producer was responsible for putting the writers' ideas on screen, and the script editor for applying quality control to them. Technically, a script editor was not supposed to be writing scripts himself, but Douglas Adams sometimes worked round this by writing under a pseudonym.

The new production team should follow this more collegaite structure. As well as a producer and a script editor, there should also be a head writer, who should recruit the writing team, and plan any details such as character development that need to flow from story to story. However, unlike a showrunner, they should be first amongst equals on the writing team, and need not write more scripts personally than anyone else. It should be possible for aspiring writers to submit story outlines, and if they show prommiss, the writers could be invited to develop them further. This would be one way of diversifying the writing pool.

The script editor should review the scripts, suggest any rewrites that are necessary to improve the story or ensure consistency with other stories, and have the power to reject any scripts that aren't good enough. On quality control, the script editor's word in law. Since the script editor isn't one of the writing team, nobody's bad script gets made just because they wrote it.

Once the scripts have been chose, the producer is responsible for getting them on screen. They appoint directors, oversee the rest of the crew, and cast the leads. (Casting guest characters is a job for individual directors).

When it comes to casting the leads, showrunners have generally chosen actors that they personally want to work with. Sometimes it works well - Peter Capaldi, David Tennant. Sometimes it doesn't - Chris Eccleston (as previously mentioned), Jodie Whittaker (all other things being equal, if Chris Chibnall had cast a man as the Doctor, he'd have cast the wrong man). However, Matt Smith was chosen by an open audition. Like Tom Baker, he was pretty much unknown when he was cast, but in 45 minutes of The Eleventh Hour he went from Matt Who? to Matt Doctor Who. Open auditions are, I think, the way to go, for both Doctors and companions.

I'd like to give the leads some creative input. Tom Baker could be a nightmare to work with, but his ideas did bring about improvements to some stories. Famously, in The Face of Evil, he refused to threaten another character with a knife, and add-libbed the classic line "Take me to your leader, or I'll kill him with this deadly jelly-baby! Choose the best actors you can find and then trust them.

Whenever there's a change of personnel on Doctor Who, the press are always speculating, who should the new Doctor be? Who should the new showrunner be? To the first question, my answer is always "the best man for the job" and to the second, my answer is nobody.

Saving Doctor Who: Visual Effects

Special effects are like magic. They only work if you can't see how they're done.

20th Century Doctor Who was notoriously cheaply produced, but many of the effects stand up surprisingly well. Let's compare two such effects with their modern equivalent.

The original regeneration effect in The Tenth Planet was done by cross-fading from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton with a broken fader. This caused the first Doctor's face to flare out and then fade back into the second's. It still looks good now, and must have been even more impressive at the time, when the audience had never seen a regeneration before and didn't know what do expect. It was meant to imply that something mysterious and eerie was happening to the Doctor. The fountain of golden light effect used in 21st Century Doctor Who looks flashy, and seems to be intended to give an impression of enormous power.

The Dalek extermination effect used up to Genesis of the Daleks involved overexposing the image of the victim until it solarised. That was meant to give an impression of overwhelming power, and it works. It still looks genuinely scary now. By contrast, the effect used in 21st Century stories, where the victim turns into a glowing skeleton, looks incredibly fake.

One key reason that neither of the 21st Century effects look as good as their 20th Century predecessors is that they're both obviously CGI. CGI has been overused, not just in Doctor Who but in other shows, to the extent that everybody can spot it a mile off. By contrast, in the 20th Century, production teams just had to get creative with what they had available.

This doesn't mean that the effects used in the 20th Century were always better. The Invisible Enemy looks pretty ropy, especially the giant prawn costume, and the stop motion dinosaurs in Invasion of the Dinosaurs were contracted out to a company that over-promissed and under-delivered. It seems that in the wilderness years, the things things didn't work were remembered more than the things that did, and Doctor Who's reputation for being cheap and shonky became somewhat exagerated. So when the show came back, the producers wanted to say "We've got a budget now, and we're not afraid to use it!", and make sure we saw the money on screen. As well as the overuse of flashy and obvious CGI effects, this led to things like the fashion parade of irrelevant aliens in The End of the World. The trend was only exacerbated by the money from the Disney deal, and fueled RTD's unfortunate tendency towards style over substance.

This doesn't mean that CGI doesn't have its place - for example, it could be used to create aliens like we've never seen before - but it has to be used subtly, and the visual effects team should think carefully about what will work best and look most natural in a particular scene.

Getting creative with what you've got still works. The production team needed to save money on Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead because other stories had run over budget. So the "I'm sorry, you have two shadows" effect was done simply with lighting.

My advice to the next production team is that the effects have to serve the story, and that it's not the money we want to see on screen, it's the creativity.

And maybe you should have a conjuror on your effects team.

Saving Doctor Who: Worldbuilding

For a show that can go anywhere in time and space, 21st Century Doctor Who is strangely parochial. Its concerns are those of a WEIRD culture - Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic. Our own planet has far more ways of seeing the world that Doctor Who is showing us, let alone the rest of the Universe.

In The Star Beast Donna asks The Meep what its pronouns are. This assumes that The Meep's native language has the same type of sex-based gender system as English, and that The Meep has the same sort of hangups about that as Russel T Davies. But only about a third of human languages have sex-based gender systems, and over half have no gender system at all. In some languages, the correct pronoun is determined by things like age, social status and formality. Some languages hardly use pronouns at all - either because the information is marked on the verb, or because you omit anything that can be understood from context. Speakers of languages with sex-based gender systems often take the attitude that gender just part of the way the language works, no big deal. If you ask an alien what its pronouns are, a reasonable answer is "What the heck are you talking about?"

One 20th Century story that depicted a fictional society particularly well was The Robots of Death. The story is confined to a single location, the sandminer, but the costumes, the dialogue between the crew members, their job titles, and Uvanov's backstory paint a vivid picture of the wider society of Kaldor. Kaldor, we learn, is a society ruled (often corruptly) by the First Families, where elaborate headdresses and face-paint are used to show status and office. Someone from outside the First Families can rise to command on talent, but risks being made a scapegoat if the First Families want to cover something up. They are dependent on robots - robots might even be employed to bring up an orphaned child - but often uneasy about this and still value human insight. Its economy revolved around using mobile sandminer vehicles to harvest valuable minerals from desert sandstorms. Their unease about their dependence on robots sometimes develops into full-blown robophobia. The explanation given for this, "It's like being surrounded by walking, talking dead men," is psychologically plausible - it's what we call the Uncanny Valley Effect.

This brings me to one of my greatest disappointments with 21st Century Doctor Who. For a science fiction show, it doesn't actually seem to care about science. In Gridlock, the cars are all using each other's exhausts as fuel. That's a perpetual motion machine, and if you have any knowledge of physics at all, it breaks suspension of disbelief. OK, so things like the TARDIS are definitely Sufficiently Advanced Technology, but basing the technology seen in the show on sound scientific principles wherever possible could lead to stronger stories - the more you care, the better you write. When the show first began the "Educate" bit of "Inform, Educate and Entertain" was an important part of its brief, and to that end they had a scientific advisor to ensure that science depicted made sense. His name was Kit Pedlar, and he devised the Cybermen.

As RTD leaned more and more into outright fantasy, he wrote weaker and weaker stories as a result. An example of this is the Pantheon of Discord. In a Pantheon story, a godlike being turns up, along with a "harbringer" (who does nothing), giggles inanely, announces that he's the God of Something, causes havoc, and sets the Doctor an arbitrary puzzle that he has to solve to defeat him. I don't think any idea has ever been overused more quickly.

Another area that Doctor Who originally sought to educate people about was history. 21st Century stories with a historical setting are usually "The Doctor Meets Famous Person" stories. One problem with this is that the famous historical person has to be given a simplified, broad strokes treatment that ignores their real flaws and complexities, and the second is that it tends to implicitly support the Great Men view of history, which most historians consider old-fashioned at best. Seeing the lives of ordinary people in history has potential. The most successful historical character there's ever been was Jamie McCrimmon, an ordinary Scot who fought on the losing side of the Battle of Culloden, and went on to become the Second Doctor's companion.

Pure historical stories were abandoned by the BBC after the first few years of Doctor Who because audiences found them boring compared to science fiction stories. Aliens invading in the past can work better - The Visitation is a good example. However, getting the balance between the science fiction and history right can be tricky. Rosa and Demons of the Punjab both felt that they'd have worked better if you took all the science fiction elements out of them - incuding the Doctor.

Another setting we need to think about is contemporary Earth. I feel that this should be used sparingly (not more than one per season), and that when it is used, it should feel like the world we live in. Since Rose, RTD set stories in an alternative present, where alien invasions were increasingly common knowledge, ending up with UNIT having a huge skyscraper base with a helipad in the middle of London. Part of Steven Moffat's motivation for the Cracks in Time story arc was go get back to the feeling that Doctor Who could be set in our world. It's much more involving if you can make believe that one day you could meet the Doctor in the street, get mixed up in his latest adventure, and be invited for a ride in the TARDIS.

Character development is an important part of making a story feel real, and unfortunately, 21st Century Doctor Who has often skimped on this. According to The Writer's Tale, RTD likes to delineate a character in three words. As a result, his characters tend to be shallow and static. In his first term as showrunner, the only companion he gave significant development to was Donna, and he ended her story the first time round by undoing all her character development. At least he tried to right this in the 60th Anniversary specials. Steven Morrat's companion characters, Amy, Rory and Clara, were much better developed. We got to know them, we saw where they were coming from, and what their lives outside the TARDIS were like. We learnt how travelling with the Doctor changed them - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Clara's inherent compassion and her growing recklessness made her death in Face the Raven a shockingly logical end for her character.

Doctor Who has a long, complex and sometimes contradictory history, and has always worn its continuity lightly. However, it's important to retain some sense of coherence, and to this end writers should respect the work of their predecessors. You shouldn't contradict previous stories unless they're really terrible. Artibrarily retconning the Doctor's entire backstory, as Chris Chibnall did with the Timeless Child story arc, added nothing. An ordinary Time Lord who ran away and got involved in the wider universe is a better backstory than a mysterious immortal being who the Time Lords got their powers by experimenting on. And what did it give us? A mess of contradictions, a character who claims to be the Doctor but has none of the Doctor's values, and an episode that consists of one third the irrelevant life story of a boring Irish policeman, one third the Master giving a pointless infodump, and one third the worst Cybermen story ever made. The Timeless Child belongs in the same bin as "I'm half human on my mother's side."

It's a big, strange, scary, wonderful universe out there, and we've got a TARDIS. Let's go and explore it.

Good worldbuilding makes good stories.

Saving Doctor Who: Tone, Morality and Politics

Science fiction has always been a genre that engages with moral and political issues. It uses aliens and other worlds to show us our problems through different eyes. Doctor Who was inspired by the foundational works of HG Wells, whose The War of the Worlds is one of the classics of anti-colonial literature. The Doctor is generally protrayed as an anti-authoritarian figure, and his greatest enemies, the Daleks, are Nazis. The best stories of the 21st Century are typically the ones with the strongest moral themes, such as Oxygen, in which the villain is a corporation that puts profit above human life. The BBC's mission is to Inform, Educate and Entertain, and there's no good reason why Doctor Who shouldn't do all three.

However, to do so successfully, the show needs a consistent moral framework. During Steven Moffat's time as showrunner, the Doctor would often say that he was "Never cruel and never cowardly". However, The Interstellar Song Context, which trys to cover the same themes as Oxygen undermines its message with a scene in which the Doctor tortures a character in cold blood. In fact, RTD's writing in his last season seems to have developed a nasty streak of cruelty. We had a scene in which the Doctor cuts off the power to a hospital, one in which robots vapourise a cat, and one in which the villain is reduced to an egg and a sperm and then hoovered up by a floor-cleaning robot, all played for laughs, in the space of a single episode.

Part of the problem is that RTD's moral thinking has become shallow and simplistic. The frantic pace of his episodes rarely allows for any message deeper than "This stuff's bad, OK?" which comes off as patronising at best. Also, he seems to think that morality consists entirely of cheering for the right people. One problem with that is that you're deciding who's good and who's bad based on who they are, not what they do. Another is that people who don't count as the right people end up being villfied. Any what do people do when the feel villfied? They push back. If you portray all straight white men as evil losers, as RTD did in his last season, a certain proportion of them will think, "Stuff you, I'm voting for the Daleks!"

Moral messages should be offered to the audience to be taken freely, not forced upon them. Showrunners doing deliberately contentious things and saying, "If you disagree with me, you're a bad person!" achieves nothing but raising hackles and dividing the crowd.

Moral messages also need to form a natural part of the story. If you have to finish with the Doctor preaching a trite little sermon, as many 13th Doctor stories did, you've failed. In Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor's dilemma about how far he can go to thwart the rise of the greatest evil power in the Universe without becoming like them himself is the very heart of the story. One of the key themes of the Third Doctor's era is the conflict between the Doctor's anti-authoritarian values and the Brigadier's military mindset, and how they manage to work together for a common purpose and even be good friends despite this. Inform, educate and entertain, but remember that in Doctor Who, you have to entertain first, and let informing and educating come along for the ride.

The last two showrunners have both attempted to make points with the identity of the Doctor. This doesn't really work. We have a lot of baggage about certain things because of our history, but the Doctor is an alien and shouldn't have those issues to start with. In Star Trek, which was first broadcast while the Civil Rights Movement was ongoing, it was important to show a black woman Lt. Uhura, as a senior officer on a star ship. However, the Doctor doesn't belong to that type of command structure, and he comes from a planet where the Atlantic slave trade and segregation never happened. He should be able to treat our baggage about skin colour as a load of pathetic nonsense. In The Story and The Engine, the Doctor goes to Nigeria because he says he feels at home there as a black man. But Ncuti Gatwa had always played his version of the Doctor as queer, and Nigeria is a shockingly homophobic country. I felt that the episode should have been called The Elephant in the Room.

Injustice always has a historical context. I found it depressing that the villain in Rosa, who was trying to thwart the Civil Rights Movement, came from 50000 years in the future. Go that far in the other direction and living in caves was an exciting new innovation. Why would the lies that slave traders told to excuse their crimes still be believed that far in the future? The unintended message seems to be that people never improve. There's not much point trying to tell people to be better if you're going to imply that they can't.

A show with time travel could use that to explore the historic roots of injustice. Suppose we have a story where one guest character seems suspicious of another for no apparent reason. A companion asks why, and he replies, "You can't trust people from Kalthur, everyone knows that." Later, the character from Kalthur does something heroic, and we see that the other's prejuduce against him was unjustified.

In a later story, we visit Kalthur in the distant past, and witness the terrible events that led to the city getting its evil reputation - long forgotten by the time of the original story.

If I have one piece of advice for the writers of future Doctor Who stories on how to handle moral issues, it's don't tell people what to think, just make them think.

Saving Doctor Who: Pace and Structure

Doctor Who was better in the 20th Century.

To see why, let's look at Rogue, one of the weaker episodes Ncuti Gatwa's first season. There were two strands to the plot - in one, the Chuldur, a family of shape-shifting alien Bridgerton fans come to Regency England and infiltrate a society ball, intending to Cosplay the planet to death for no particular reason. In the other, the Doctor has a brief, doomed romance with Rogue, a Captain Jack style bounty hunter who is trying to catch them.

Unfortunately, neither of these strands had enough development. The Chuldur and their plot were slight and insubstantial. We never got to know any of their victims, so none of them seemed to matter, except for the bait-and-switch with Ruby (who was obviously going to survive the episode). Meanwhile, Rogue didn't get enough character development to explain why the Doctor would fall for him so suddenly, or why we should care about him - especially as he obviously wasn't going to survive the episode. There simply wasn't enough time to make any of the story's elements work.

The problem lies with the first and biggest mistake that RTD made when he revived the series - one he made before writing a single line. This is the single episode format that has dominated Doctor Who since 2005. Many episodes seem rushed. Either the plot and characters are underdeveloped, or the pace is breathless, or the writer tries to cram so much stuff into 45 minutes that it becomes hard to follow, or there isn't time to set up a satisfactory conclusion, so we end up with deus ex machina. It seems that Russel T Davis was subconsciously aware of these structural problems as early as The Parting of the Ways, in which Doctor doesn't have time to finish his anti-Dalek weapon, and only the literal deus ex machina of Rose looking into the heart of the Tardis and making a wish saves the day.

So why did RTD chose this format? A clue can be found in the following line from Rose.

I got the Bronze.

Russel followed the format of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had been popular in the years preceding the revival. A season would consist mainly of self-contained episodes, but build towards a final confrontation with a boss villain at the end of the season. This is the format that Doctor Who has followed (with a few variations) since.

As well as rushed storytelling, another consequence of this is that the leads have to be on screen almost all the time. This gives them a gruelling shooting schedule, and, to provide them with breaks, it's necessary to have a "Doctor-Lite" episodes - not so much Doctor Who as Doctor? Where?

Over the course of 21st Century Doctor Who's run, seasons have become shorter and shorter, from 13 episodes in 2005 to a mere 8 in 2024. This leaves fans feeling short-changed, especially when both 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble were Doctor-Lite episodes. Furthermore, because of the need for the season finale to be an event, each season finale has tried to outdo the last, leading to stories where spectacle overwhelms logic.

How did 20th Century Doctor Who do things better? Back then, stories were typically four episodes long, sometimes 6. This allowed them time to breathe. Settings could be explored, characters developed, villains given motivations, ideas fleshed out. At its best, this led to classics like Genesis of the Daleks, which had a depth of storytelling that no 21st Century story has ever approached.

When Doctor Who returns, the new production team should revive the original format. The BBC and its partners should commit to making 4 four-part stories per year. The greater depth and scope of these stories would allow us to feel that we were exploring the Universe with the Doctor, and remove the need for any one story to serve as a season finale. The pace of the action could vary from episode to episode within a story, and from scene to scene within an episode. As more time could be spent developing secondary characters, the scenes focussing on them could be sheduled together, so as to give the leads regular breaks from filming without having to take them out of a whole episode.

Doctor Who is the show that can go anywhere and do anything, but to truly reach its creative potential, it needs more than 8 single-episode stories a year. And for those of us who watched Doctor Who as children in the 20th Century, what was it we talked about in the school playground on Monday morning? The cliffhangers...

Saving Doctor Who: Introduction

Doctor Who seems to have dematerialised for the forseeable future. The Disney deal fell through, Russel T Davies is no longer involved, and the next Christmas Special has been cancelled - or rather, once the news of RTD's departure came out, he was forced to admit it had never been commissioned in the first place. Worse still, the last few seasons hadn't made the slightest bit of sense, and the last episode wrote the story into a corner that RTD's successor will have great difficulty writing their way out of. (Presumably RTD was not expecting the Disney deal to fail or the BBC to lose patience with him when he wrote that). It looks like the show will be off air for some considerable time - RTD hinted as much in an interview with Newsround after the Disney deal fell through, in which he said

The viewers of Newsround will grow up.

It's likely that he already knew he was going at that point (a drama he'd written for Channel 4 came out just before it was announced that he was leaving Doctor Who, that didn't happen overnight, and he wouldn't have done it if he had other commitments) , and he seems to have been envisioning a gap of at least 5 years before the BBC tried to revive the show again. But what should Doctor Who be like when it does return? The last few seasons have been as divisive as they have been incoherent. How can it become a show that matters again? Can it regenerate into a show that people love? What do we want from Doctor Who? I've got my own ideas, and over the next week or so I'll be putting them forward in a series of articles. Each will address a different aspect of the making of Doctor Who, and I'll try to analyse what went wrong with it, how it has been done right in the past, and what I think should happen going forward. I'll be referring a lot to 20th Century Doctor Who, which I think generally had better stories. The esssays I'm planning are:

1. Pace and Structure
2. Tone, Morality and Politics
3. Worldbuilding
4. Visual Effects
5. Behind the Scenes
6. Conclusions

Together, they will comprise my manifesto for how to recreate Doctor Who better than ever. I welcome feedback, as long as it aims to improve my ideas, not shoot them down. As the fan community is so divided at the moment, I can't expect everyone to agree with me, and some of the things I think were mistakes are likely to have vociferous defenders. I'm also aware that the more divisive storylines of recent years have attracted knee-jerk reactions from the more obnoxious elements of the fanbase. However, just because there are people who object to something for stupid reasons, it doesn't mean there are not intelligent reasons for criticising it. If I get sufficient constructive feedback, I'll add a postscript discussing the points raised, but I won't engage with people who accuse me of prejudice, or claim to agree with me for prejudiced reasons.

My Portfolio: Curriculum Vitae

The first stop on our tour of my portfolio website is my Curriculum vitae. It gives a summary of my long and varied career in data science and R&D. There are also links to case studies for some of the projects I'm particulary proud of, as well as external links to my PhD thesis and projects I've contributed to (either professionally or as open source contributions). You should learn something new on every project, and this might give some idea about just how much I've learnt during my career.